Chapter 30
CINDY
They put me in a concrete room with a cot, a bucket, a single caged bulb, and the first thing I do is not cry.
The second thing I do is start working the problem, because crying is a thing for later, for when I’m safe, for when there’s someone to hold me, and right now the only person who’s going to get me out of here is me.
The room smells of salt and old diesel. Cold comes up through the floor like the building died years ago and never warmed back over. When the wind moves outside, the whole structure ticks, metal on metal, a dead factory talking in its sleep.
I know two things, and I make myself hold onto both of them like handrails. Panic wants the wheel. Panic can wait in the car.
The first is where I am. They weren’t careful with their mouths around me, the men who walk the halls, because what’s a pregnant woman in a locked room going to do with anything she overhears.
So I listen. I hear it twice through the steel door, a name, said the offhand way men say the name of a place they work, the Calder Salt Works.
And when they walked me in from the car, half-blind with fear, some watchful part of me still read the faded letters on the side of the building in the security lights.
CALDER SALT, the rest peeled away to rust. An old industrial place, dead for years, all cold concrete and corrugated steel out on the white nothing of a dry lakebed.
I know the name of my own grave. That’s the first handrail, and it matters more than it should, because a woman who knows where she is can tell someone how to come get her.
The second thing I know is the only reason I’m still breathing.
They are being careful with me. Not kind, careful, the way you’re careful with a thing that’s worth money.
They bring vitamins with the food, prenatal ones, drugstore brand, still in the box.
Somebody drove to a pharmacy for the hostage.
I take them, because the baby doesn’t care whose money bought them.
Turns out neither do I. Nobody’s hit me.
Nobody’s done to me what they did to Crystal, and they had no such hesitation with Crystal.
The difference is the thing in my belly.
A dead witness is nothing to these people, they proved that in the desert.
But a pregnant witness, carrying the pakhan’s heir, that’s the richest piece of leverage in the whole war, and you don’t damage your leverage.
Timur said it in the headlights. Morozov wants her whole. So as long as the baby is alive, they need me alive and unharmed, which means the one thing keeping me breathing is also the one thing I can use.
I lie on the cot in the dark and I work out exactly how.
I do some of it in Crystal’s voice, which is the secret I’ll keep even from Sevastian.
She stays with me in that cell, bossy, bright, telling me which guard has a kind face, which one to work on, the way she’d have known inside an hour.
Get up, babe. Hair up. We’re not dying in a salt factory.
It takes me most of a day to get my nerve up, a day of listening, of learning the rhythm of the door, how many of them there are, when the one who seems to be in charge steps out.
Three regulars, plus the boss with the radio voice.
The young one slides my food in without looking, ashamed, which is information.
The big one looks too long, which is worse information.
The third whistles pop songs in the corridor, flat, endless, the same four bars.
There’s a doctor somewhere in the building, I’ve gathered that much, some bought wreck of a man they keep on hand for the sole reason that a pregnant hostage is no good to anybody if she loses the baby in a concrete room. Good. I’m counting on him.
In the dark of that long day, I think hard about what waiting actually gets me.
I do lunges. Quiet ones, by the wall, because cold muscle is slow muscle and I might get one chance at fast. The knee holds.
Seven years of babying it, and the night I need it most, it holds like it’s been waiting to be asked.
If I wait, the best case is that someone comes for me before Morozov decides I’m more useful as a message than a hostage, the way Crystal turned from a hostage into a message in the space of an afternoon.
Crystal waited. Crystal trusted that being valuable would keep her alive.
They took her apart anyway, the second her value ran out, left her in the sand for the news.
I am not going to bet my baby’s life on the mercy of men who did that to my best friend.
Waiting is a thing you do when someone trustworthy is in charge of your fate.
Nobody in this building is trustworthy. So I will not wait.
Crystal waited one afternoon. I heard how that ended on the news with the rest of Nevada.
I will make my own window, and I will use the one card these men have left in my hand without knowing they did it.
The card is the baby. The thing they need kept alive is the thing that lets me blow this place open from the inside. Six weeks old, the size of nothing, already pulling its weight. That’s my kid.
When I’m ready, I make it real.
I’m a dancer. I have performed through a stress fracture with a smile sewn on my face. I know how to sell my body doing something it isn’t doing, and I know, from a worse education, exactly what a woman losing a pregnancy looks like, because I’ve held a friend through it on a bathroom floor.
So I give them all of it. I wait until I hear two of them near the door.
I start low, a moan, building, and then I’m on the floor curled around myself making the sounds, real sounds, the kind that come from somewhere true even when you’re faking the cause.
I get my hand into my own mouth and bite down until I taste blood, real blood.
I smear it where it needs to be, on my thighs, on the concrete, a smear of red that doesn’t lie even though I am.
My hands shake doing it. Good. Shaking reads true.
I let the body do its honest panicking in service of the con, every tremor on payroll now.
Then I scream like the worst thing in the world is happening, because for these men, it is.
The door bangs open.
It works exactly the way I bet my life it would.
The first man takes one look at the blood and goes white, because he is not afraid of me, he’s afraid of what his boss does to the man who let the heir die on his shift.
He shouts, and it isn’t a threat, it’s a name, the doctor’s, bellowed down the corridor in panic.
A second man crowds in behind him. Then a third. Just like that, the careful business of guarding me falls apart, because every instinct in the room has flipped from keeping me contained to keeping the baby alive, and a woman bleeding on the floor pulls men toward her instead of away.
They crouch. They reach for me. They are, God help them, trying to help.
The young one is closest, white to the lips, fumbling for the doctor on the radio.
For one bad second I’m sorry for him, a boy holding a tray job in a kidnapping.
Then I remember whose desert this is, whose friend, whose baby, and the sorry burns off fast.
And on the little table by the door, where one of them set it down to free both hands for the emergency, there’s a phone.
I have already worked out the number. It’s the one thing I made myself memorize in all these weeks behind his walls, the way you’d memorize the way out of a burning building, the only string of digits in the world that could save my life.
His. I’ve turned it over so many times in the dark that it’s the most solid thing I own.
Ten digits, written by hand on a black card a lifetime ago.
I hated him when I memorized them. The number stayed. The hate didn’t.
I move while they’re all looking at the blood.
One hand, off the floor, onto the table, the phone already unlocked because the idiot was mid-text when I started screaming.
My thumbs are shaking so badly I almost can’t, and I don’t have time for a message, for a plea, for I’m scared or help me or I love you.
I have time for one true thing, the only thing that matters, the thing that turns me from a missing woman into a place on a map.
I type three words. Calder Salt Works.
I hit send to his number a half second before the nearest guard sees what I’m doing. His face changes, and he lunges.
But here is the thing none of them understands, the thing that has kept being the difference my whole life.
They have spent a day and a night treating me as cargo.
Precious, fragile, a thing that happens to other people.
They forgot there’s a person in here. The person was a competitive athlete before her body broke.
She has fought men twice her size in parking lots.
She has exactly one thing left to lose, plus a brand-new ferocious reason not to lose it.
So when he lunges, I’m already moving.
I throw the phone at the second man’s face, hard, and it buys me the half second I need. The bucket is the nearest thing with weight. I get it by the handle and swing it into the lunging guard’s head with everything I have, all the leg I used to have, all the rage I have now.
He goes down hard against the doorframe.
I am up and over him before the others untangle themselves from the mess of helping me.
Then I’m through the door, into the corridor, barefoot, bloody, free, running.
The corridor tastes of smoke already, or I imagine it does. Doesn’t matter. Run now, taste later.
I don’t know where I’m running. That’s the part they never put in the fantasies.
I just know it’s away, down a long corridor of cold concrete and dead fluorescent light, past doors I don’t have time to try, my bare feet slapping the floor, my breath sawing, behind me the shouting starting up, the careful quiet of the place breaking into the noise of men who have just realized the cargo has legs.
I make it around one corner. Another. I’m looking for a door to the outside, for the white blast of desert light, for anything, when a man steps into the corridor ahead of me.
I skid. I turn. There are more behind me now.
For one cold second I understand that speed and fury only get you so far inside a building full of armed men, that I am one barefoot pregnant woman in a hallway, that they are many, that they have guns, that the odds were always going to catch up to me eventually.
And that is the exact second the world ends.
It comes as light first, a white flash through the high dirty windows, and then the sound arrives a heartbeat behind it, a concussion so huge it isn’t a sound at all, it’s a hand that shoves the whole building sideways.
The floor jumps under my bare feet. Dust comes down from the ceiling in sheets.
Somewhere close, glass blows in. And then, under the ringing that’s swallowed the whole world, I feel it more than hear it, the unmistakable hammering of gunfire, a lot of it, close.
Men are screaming who aren’t screaming about me anymore.
The men in the corridor forget I exist. They turn toward the noise, guns coming up, shouting orders at each other in Russian, and the whole shape of the night has changed in an instant, because this is no longer a building where the only emergency is me.
Something is attacking the Calder Salt Works.
I stand there in the shuddering corridor, my ears ringing, my heart slamming, and I have a choice. It’s the whole of who I am, this choice.
I could hide. Every sane cell in my body says hide, find a closet, a corner, a dark space behind something, fold down into it, wait for the noise to end, pray that whoever wins comes looking for me gently.
That’s the safe play. That’s the play the old me would have made, the girl who kept her head down and her mouth shut, who learned that wanting things gets you hurt, who spent seven years making sure nobody had a reason to look at her twice.
But I sent three words to one number. And there is exactly one person on this earth who would tear a building apart in the desert at night to reach me, one man who told me he would end this, one man who swore it with my hand under his in the dark.
I don’t know for certain it’s him. It could be a war I’m just caught inside of.
But I didn’t fight my way out of that room and brain a man with a bucket to go cower in a closet now.
If he came, I am not going to make him search a burning building for me. I am going to walk toward him.
I make my choice. I go toward the guns.
I step over the man nearest me, the one the blast put on the floor, his weapon a foot from his open hand.
Some cold clear part of me that has been planning since the back seat of that car bends and takes it, because a woman walking toward a gunfight should not do it empty-handed.
The metal is heavier than I expect. I’ve never fired one in my life.
It doesn’t matter. It’s not really for them.
It’s so that when I find him, or when whatever’s coming finds me, I’m the one still standing instead of the thing on the floor.
Smoke rolls down the corridor toward me, dense and chemical, lit from somewhere by a flickering orange that wasn’t there before.
The gunfire is ahead, past the smoke, getting closer or getting louder, I can’t tell which.
My ears are screaming. My feet are bleeding.
There’s a baby the size of nothing inside me, a stolen gun shaking in my two hands, and I have never in my life been less of a victim than I am right now.
I take a breath of the burning air. I think, one way or another, I am getting out of this building tonight.
Then I walk into the smoke, toward the war, toward the chance that he came for me.